Hello,
in former times I was an user of BeOS.
Fast, save, easy to install, easy to handle.
Today I’ve downloaded Haiku and installed Haiko.
Surprise:
No bootmanager, softwareupdater no function,
don’t find my usb mouse - what’s happened with Be?
Sorry but not really for Newbies!
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Yes, it’s a beta, some stuff will not work.
Could you file tickets for your issues so they may be fixed in the future?
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If you installed Beta3 now that Beta4 has branched, the package management breakage is a known bug.
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How can I get Beta4?
(As far as I can tell, the latest installation ISO still is Beta3)
See this thread in Development, OS
Note that there is not yet a release candidate afaik and at least as off that thread being posted.
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Haiku is, to the best of my understanding, NOT BeOS despite aiming for some degree of application/software compatibility. Such compatibility as exists is also (again, afaik) restricted to the the
32-bit version of Haiku (especially the gcc2h variant).
Haiku isn’t really intended for “newbies”, except maybe as a long term release goal, and likely never has been.
But, If you’re having particular problems it would be best if you could be more specific and as detailed as possible. Otherwise, people might just take it as unproductive complaining…
Haiku is actually aimed at normal, rather non-technical users which you might call “newbies”. But due to it being in beta status quite a few things can happen that non-technical users might find a bit overwhelming (eg. boot issues, hardware being not or only halfway supported, etc…)
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Not being able to assume hardware just works is always going to be something that you have to deal with on a niche OS and that surely was the case with BeOS as well although maybe things like mice were less complicated and didn’t require a variety of drivers back then.
Even though Linux has grown to such a degree these days that you have a much better time with hardware than you used to I still personally own an old Roccat mouse that just does not work with Linux and never has for example.
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First of all, welcome to the Haiku community 
If Haiku is the only OS on your system you don’t need a boot manager. The bootloader is installed when installing the OS, at least on BIOS systems. (not sure what the status on UEFI is currently). If indeed you need a boot manager you can install BootMan by running the BootManager application from /boot/system/apps.
Can you give us a bit more details on that? Did you get an error message? If yes, which one?
Does your network connection work? A working network connection is of course necessary for software updater.
Not sure what the problem could be here. Maybe you can give us a little bit more information on what system you are using. And which version of Haiku you are running (Beta3, Beta4 test candidate, nightly, 32bit or 64bit…)
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I guess what I am trying to get at is that it is an incomplete (by comparison to any other modern OS) operating system that is till under active development on some level. So it’s nothing at all like a final stable release you might see with other OSes, like Debian Bullseye (11) or Windows 10.
Thus, Haiku is not for newbies in quite the same respect that Ubuntu historically targeted users who were new to Linux as a whole.
Go to: /ipfs/QmQruioo3Jf5CaxhocsVRCRB9KtJPkkzk2ThVsjinXqgYW/ (cloudflare-ipfs.com)
a. Intel/AMD x64 - https://cloudflare-ipfs.com/ipfs/QmQruioo3Jf5CaxhocsVRCRB9KtJPkkzk2ThVsjinXqgYW/haiku-r1beta4-tc0-x86_64.iso
b. Intel/AMD x32 - https://cloudflare-ipfs.com/ipfs/QmQruioo3Jf5CaxhocsVRCRB9KtJPkkzk2ThVsjinXqgYW/haiku-r1beta4-tc0-x86_gcc2h.iso
These are test candidates for Beta4. Test (LiveCD) and install them as needed.
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On UEFI it is not automatically installed, and on BIOS it is, but only if you follow the exact correct sequence of operations to create a partition table, activate the partition, and not attempt to reuse existing partitions in your system (or if you do, you need to rewrite the MBR to be sure of what’s in it, and also change the partition type and make sure it is active).
If you miss just one of these steps, you end up with a non working system.
A native install of BeOS wasn’t really any easier than that, I think either people used only the Personal Edition or don’t remember going through the installer? Back then everyone knew a bit more about partitions, but today it seems to be becoming a lost art or something.
Anyway, yes, there is some polishing of the installation process to do. We have solved some of the issues in Beta4, but there are more. That is indeed why we are in beta phase, which should be a sufficient warning that, yes, we are not yet ready to replace BeOS (in this area and some other places too).
There is a difference between the goal (which is definitely “for newbies”) and what we have now (which is why we call that a beta version: it does not allow us to reach our goal yet).
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Hello,
thank you for all your comments.
I deleted Haiku from my notebook
but I ‘bookmarked’ Haiku and will be back
if it is in a stable version.
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Blockquote A native install of BeOS wasn’t really any easier than that, I think either people used only the Personal Edition or don’t remember going through the installer? Back then everyone knew a bit more about partitions, but today it seems to be becoming a lost art or something.
Back in the mid to late '90s I had five PCs and four partitions, three of which had OSs and the fourth data divided by OS but I would sometimes save files in the same folder for different OSs if I could open and save from one OS/program and open and save in another OS/program.
I used boxed versions of BeOS 5 (5.1?), OS/2 Warp (all versions), Linux (six or seven) and a few other OSs including NOSs trying to see what I liked most and what NOSs and email servers/clients worked with what.
I actually got most things working with each other to some point but not everything. I spent 10s of not hundreds or thousands of hours with different OSs/distributions. This was not me playing a tiny bit but trying to spend serious time with each (I was programmer (IBM/HP mainframes, all PC OSs here plus DOS/Windows (gross) plus sr systems analyst/business analyst/man with many hats running Windows & OS/2 at work at a bank.
Moving back and forth between partitions on my PCs was like changing underwear each day. By that I mean I could do it without really being awake to think about it.
Then in 2001/2004 my health cratered (nearly died) and I dropped everything but OS/2 but was looking for an OS home. Be was dead. Windows, not a chance in hell, Linux … to much hassle with my health problems and OS/2 even though declared dead by IBM was still running flawlessly for me.
I got a chance to check out Mac OS X which was still not to 10.5 but close and with all the OSs dying out there and Linux … I WANTED to want it but … well if it came down to Windows or Linux it would definitely be Linux. But Mac OS X wooed me hard and then 10.5 came out and my last PC with OS/2 had a power supply die and the other PCs power supplies weren’t different shapes and didn’t fit into that box and they were older and having problems so I basically ended up with just Mac OS X.
The iPod came out. Then the iPhone and iPad and it was just easy to keep it going.
When I saw Haiku for the first time I was like YEEEEAAAAAA!!! In a “few years” I’ll be able to drop Mac and go Be/Haiku and … reality … brick wall … smashed face … ouch!
I have a 2019 27" intel iMac which obviously is not an M series Mac (no more 27" iMac (GROWL in anger).
Fall 2023 will be my FORTIETH year officially an IT person when I got my first official programming job and I’ve seen a LOT over the years. People on this site will appreciate my pride in having put in over 200 hours on five totally different brands (I count Linux as 1) of PC (not counting Mac) OSs that I installed at home and seriously checked them out to see what I would settle on.
In the end —I— didn’t get to make the decision. Companies made the decision for me when Be (no fault of their own) when bye bye. OS/2 (totally IBM’s fault, two nuns talking in Italian about … WTF? OS/2? What drugs were they on?). Linux, I lost track how how many distributions. I have boxes for six “brands” of distributions but I’m counting linux as 1 OS. I —almost— liked several of them but never loved them like BeOS or OS/2.
It wasn’t like I didn’t understand how to use Linux. I often helped the phone company’s techs work on our UNIX PBX so it wasn’t like I didn’t know UNIX/Linux (two separate OSs in my opinion and yes I know that Mac is built on top of UNIX). I don’t know how to describe why I never fell in love with Linux other than, I spend 12 to 14 and sometimes sixteen hours a day at work fixing f’ing Windows and I come home and I’m really not in the mood to fix someone in Linux.
PS: Anyone that heads up a Linux distro - get together with your frenemies and make a standard on folder structures.
Mac OS X/MacOS/iPodOS/iPhone (all 1 OS to me) ended up as my default as much as anything when I plugged in video camera (didn’t matter which make/model) and iMovie recognized every single one without me having to install anything and I was able to make professional looking DVDs/YouTube videos/etc. Oh, and HandBrake … I’m not saying anything else other than I bought all the DVDs, I wasn’t pirating them.
Anyway, using partitions used to be like switching to another app for me. It’s been about 18 years since I’ve done that and I should have written a book for myself about what I knew then but I was both too busy and too sick by then. Don’t worry, my health has been a lot better.
I miss the mid 1990s to early 2000s when BeOS came out, OS/2 2.0 beta came out. I still have boxes for Mandrake, Corel (with WordPerfect for Linux included in the box), Debian, Caldera Open Linux and others.
The world of OSs seemed to exciting back then. The WWW was hitting its stride. No more BBSs, the internet was here and then kind of a thud as OSs went bye bye or just didn’t mix well with me.
If someone can tell me how to get Haiku beta 4 running on MacOS either on top of MacOS or dual booting I will try it out. I’m sure that BePositive and other Be apps won’t run anymore but maybe I’ll find some newer programs that I like and with me retiring next year I’ll have a whole lot more time on my hands to get back into OSs again and relearn partitions again. Maybe Haiku will be the “Next Big Thing” for me. I’ve been following it since I first stumbled upon Haiku when search for anything new about BeOS.
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